One way to tell if your video may be interesting enough for people to pass around is write a headline describing it. On the Internet, unlike on TV, people decide what to read and view based on the text that appears in links. If your video can’t be summed up with catchy link text, it may not be compelling enough. It’s a sign that your premise needs work.
The web is not TV. It’s a different medium with different rules. We’ve put together a compendium of the top 10 rules for success with online video. These are the principles we’ll be following for our own projects and we’re certain they’ll help others as well. Read 10ton’s Top 10
Three-hundred sixty four days a year, TV ads are, at best, forgettable background noise. People don’t pay much attention or give them a second thought. But as we all know, there’s one day on which the ads are the star. On Super Bowl Sunday, people eagerly anticipate each year’s crop of creative ads, and gather around with their friends to watch them, and talk about them afterwards. The ads are as much an event as the game.
What makes an ad an event? It has to be inherently entertaining, so that people want to watch on its own merit, even if they have no initial feelings about the product. It has to be so good that people will seek it out, set aside time to watch it, and share it with their friends. And they’ll come away with a positive impression of the product.
TV ads work by relentlessly repeating a message until it’s drilled into the viewer’s mind. But there’s no way this will work online. On the Web, anything forgettable or intrusive is just going to annoy people, waste their time, and leave a bad impression—if the user doesn’t click away first.
Like Super Bowl ads, the best online ads are actively sought out on their own merit, as a shared experience with friends. Thanks to the email, IM, social networks and other online tools, the Internet creates a cultural space for social interaction around advertising. People will link to the best ads on YouTube, embed them in their blogs, and send them to their friends. They’ll talk about cool new ads with the same enthusiasm they’d talk about about a hit song or a new book.
The best online ads are events. Because on the Internet, it’s Super Bowl Sunday 365 days a year.
Welcome to the 10ton blog! We’ve dedicated ourselves to making effective, entertaining video for the web, and in this blog we’re going to talk about the best way to accomplish this, highlight the best uses of video online, and talk about the people, companies and businesses that are doing a great job harnessing the power of online video.
This is a brand new medium, and we’ll be joining you along the way in discovering its possibilities.
One thing that’s obvious is that the older ways of advertising are going to have limited effectiveness online. When browsing, the user has near total control, and intrusive ads, like the traditional 30-second television commercial, just aren’t going to work. If we can’t engage the consumer, and make it an enjoyable experience for them, why bother? The ads that we make are also going to be the ones that we’d actually want to watch.
On the 10ton blog, we’re going to talk about how advertising on the Internet is different and show, with our own ideas and videos, how to make it work. It’ll certainly be interesting!
